


runner

by partlysunny



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Gen, animus island weirdness, basically desmond is lost in his own head, jumbled up memories, set during revelations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 21:37:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2285301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partlysunny/pseuds/partlysunny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Tell me about the beginning. You need to remember the start."</p>
            </blockquote>





	runner

**Author's Note:**

> im not over desmond's death dont touch m e

runner

 

Clay has blonde hair. In the darkness of Animus Island, darkness that is also brightness, his hair is like a fluorescent light.

“I want you to tell me about the beginning,” Clay says, sitting back on his heels. There is grass on the ground but when Desmond touches it, it phases through his fingers like it’s not even there.

“Desmond? Hey, focus. Tell me about the beginning. You need to remember the start.”

He’s sitting on a bus, near the back, and they’re on a highway. They curve along the road and cars rush past. People are chattering, someone’s cracked a window and let in the smell of gasoline and a nearby body of water, and the couple behind him is kissing. His eyes are glued to the window and he doesn’t miss a second of the view of the city, skyscrapers reaching up toward the clouds, lights like glitter on the very edge of the horizon, where the sky meets the world and everything else falls away. He’s sixteen years old but it’s like he’s been born again. But that isn’t the beginning. That isn’t the start.

There’s a girl in his bed, she has curly brown hair that streams down her back and she smells like vanilla. Nothing smells like vanilla in New York. It’s cigarettes and sweat and the distinct smell of the subway, musty and old and dark. But she smells like vanilla, and he presses his face into her hair and takes a huge breath. She’s not from around here but neither is he, neither is anyone. Everyone’s a transplant. Everyone’s still looking for a place of their own. The girl starts to ask him questions he doesn’t want to answer, or maybe he’s forgotten the answers, and he pushes them away and keeps pushing until he does what he does best. He runs. And the smell of vanilla fades into the smell of the city and until it disappears.  That’s how it starts, doesn’t it?

No, that’s not how it starts. He gets so confused sometimes. The ground under his feet looks the same everywhere, even though people always tell him the sidewalk in New York sparkles, but when he’s running, it’s all the goddamn same. It starts like this: he’s downing a shot at Bad Weather, and the liquid in the glass shifts and moves along with a beat he can feel in his bones. Someone shouts, “Hey, Des!” and he catches a bottle right before it hits him in the face.

“Whoa, you’re good at this,” the guy he took the shot with says.

“I’ve been doing this for years,” he replies. Years and years and years but that’s not true, is it? It hasn’t been that long. He knows there was something before the city and the club and the sound of the music and the flashing of the strobe lights. A quieter place. A farm?

He passes out and when he comes to, he’s being dragged by a bunch of people into a van. He’s blindfolded. He’s afraid. The city fades into the background of a blank white screen and a cool female voice informs him, “Desynchronized.”

But doesn’t it start the same way everything starts? With a boy and a girl who love each other very much, and then one day they decide to get married, and then one day they decide to have a baby, and they name the baby Desmond. He turns one, two, three, four, five, without fanfare, a cake with candles on it that he blows out and he wishes for a pony or a video game or a candy cane. And then one day, he asks his father, “When can we leave?”

“Leave where?” his father replies.

“Leave the farm. I want to go somewhere else now. Please?”

His father doesn’t reply to this. He never does.

Isn't that how it starts? Isn’t that how it always starts? Childhood is like a piece of glass, he remembers reading somewhere. You never escape it unblemished. Some people have smudges. Some people have cracks. And some people are completely shattered.

The bus rolls on through the highway. Behind him, a couple is kissing. There is a knapsack between his feet that holds an extra outfit and a bag of chips. He has sixty dollars in his pocket and half an idea of where he’s going. The city is like a living thing, emerging from the edge of the horizon like a beacon, like a promise, and he’s in love before he even gets a good look at it.

“Desynchronized.” The woman’s voice is calm and measured, and inhuman. He walks forward but there’s only more foggy white. Somewhere, another voice says, “Just wait for it to load, Desmond,” and this voice is very human.

“How long is it gonna take?” he asks. “This is the fifth time I’ve died. In a row.”

“Just a minute,” Lucy replies.

“Tell me a story,” he says. He takes a seat on the blankness, feels something hard underneath him, so he’s sitting on a solid surface, but nothing looks solid here. “While I wait.”

“Um, okay.” She pauses, thinking. Then, “I can’t think of anything.”

“Tell me about your mother,” he says.

“My mother,” she repeats. “She’s dead.”

Lucy is also dead, Lucy is bleeding out, Lucy is still warm in his arms when he sinks to the floor with her, covered in her blood, and her eyes are wide and scared and shocked and then blank.

“Shirley Templar, please,” the girl tells him. The club is crowded today. Friday nights are the worst but the tips are worth it. “I can’t get one anywhere else in the city. Is it a specialty drink?”

“Made it myself,” he says proudly. His hands mix one expertly. It’s like he’s been doing this for years and years.

The girl smiles at him and gives him a big tip and writes her phone number on the corner of a napkin she tucks into his pocket with a wink.

He doesn’t call her. He’s bound and gagged and transported to a faraway land and she wonders where he went off to, maybe, but he doesn’t think about her ever again.

How does it end? Clay won’t tell him. Animus Island is chilly, but he has on a hoodie and he tucks his hands into his pockets and asks, “What’s the point, anyway?”

“The point’s always been the same,” Clay says. He has a weird glint in his eye. Desmond doesn’t like looking him in the face for too long. “To survive. To endure. You’re still fighting, aren’t you? We all are. Everyone wants to survive.”

Desmond only wanted to live. Survival was for the farm, when his father pressed a bow and arrow into his hands and told him to hit the target, Desmond, you’ve been training for long enough, it doesn’t even have to be a bulls eye, just hit it anywhere on the target.

“Then how come you killed yourself?” he asks.

Clay laughs. It’s demented. Insane. “Because what’s the point of the point?”

“Desynchronized.” The woman’s calm voice has been exchanged for a scratchy, smoker’s voice, and Rebecca hands him a glass of water as he groggily gets up and rubs his eyes, trying to blink away the ghosts of his past.

“Thanks,” he tells her. Lucy’s clicking away behind her desk. Their eyes meet for a moment, and then he looks away, back to Rebecca, and she’s getting ready to put him under again.

“Wait.” Lucy comes over to him. Rebecca wanders away. “Are you okay?” Lucy asks him.

He shrugs. “I’m fine,” he tells her.

Her hand is warm on his forehead. He wants to kiss her. He wonders what would happen if he did.

Clay tells him, “You would’ve killed her anyway.”

Bad Weather is a mess on Fridays.

“Tell me about your parents,” the girl says, and her hair smells like vanilla.

He runs through the forest in the middle of a rainstorm, and the falling sheets of rain cover his tracks, and he’s completely soaked through, cold, afraid, and was that a twig snapping behind him? He must run harder, faster, he must outrun his father.

The first day he spends out of the farm, completely alone, covered in mud and sweat and rain, he feels as though every possibility that has ever been is being crammed into his chest. There’s a weight gone that he’d never known had been there. He is free.

“Wake up, Mr. Miles.” Vidic’s voice drags him out from his uneasy sleep. “Lots to do today.”

“Are you okay, Desmond?”

Clay’s laugh is haunting and everything is jumbling up in Desmond’s mind. He can’t remember the beginning. He thinks this is the end.

Clay runs into him and knocks him back, but before he can hit the cool grass on Animus Island, he’s lying back on a cold, hard table, sucking in breath after breath, and his father is patting his shoulders and saying, “I’m here. You’re safe. I’m here.”

You’re safe.

.


End file.
